Messages - drummstikk

The purchase of my first 7D was was unexpected as a 40D crapped as I was just starting a 3-day job that NEEDED 2 bodies. As an un-budgeted purchase, I skipped the grip at first. A month or so later, I went to buy a grip and was sticker-shocked by the price. Maybe I was wrong, but it seemed like it was quite a price hike from the price of the 40D grips I'd had before. I decided I'd already gotten along for a month without the grip, I could go a little longer.

And now, 3 years later…

With the 40D's old BP511 batts, I was glad to have a pair on board in the grip for a long day of shooting. But the 7D's batteries have better life, so I no longer worry about having two loaded at once. And the 7D plays better with my flash bracket grip-less.

I think the main reason I got the grips on my 40D's was that I felt I wouldn't look as professional otherwise. But in the end, the client looks at your photos, not your equipment. Sure, a grip feels pretty good in the hand, but every piece of my equipment has to pay for itself, and for me, the grip just doesn't add any real value.

Like the 70-200mm 2.8 I had to sell in a financial crunch last year, I'm actually kind of surprised how much I *don't* miss being gripped.

For me, it's a no-brainer in favor of the 24-105. You don't list any real low light situations (Indoor sports, music performances) among your preferred shooting conditions, so I don't think the F2.8 of the 24-70 gets you much. And with portraits, I personally don't think you get a really good bokeh/shallow depth effect with lenses shorter than 135 mm at apertures smaller than about F2.0 or 2.2. So I don't feel you'd be losing much with the F4 aperture of the 24 to 105.

On the other hand, the additional 35mm of zoom range you get with the 24-105 mm will reap for you huge benefits with its versatility. I've done entire jobs within 24-105 that would have me switching back-and-forth between a 24-70 and a longer telephoto.

I let my 70-200 2.8 zoom go over a year ago in a financial crisis. Then a couple of months back my 24-105 developed problems beyond economical repair after over 7 years of hard daily use. It actually continues to surprise me how much I *DON'T* miss the 70-200, but after a month or two without the 24-105, I'm really feeling it and will probably have to replace it soon.

I can't offer an opinion on Canon versus Sigma on this one. Would definitely take a close look at the Sigma.

Unless you have random strangers walking up to you and jiggling your lens shade, this problem is of consequence only to you and has zero effect on image quality. I owned a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS (Mark nothing) lens for about 7-8 years, and by the time I sold it, the shade had gotten fairly "wiggley." But it never threatened to fall off and still blocked stray light as well as it ever did. My 24-105 f/4.0 shade also did the same thing. But in its declining years, it was used exclusively on APS-C cameras, so I substituted a deeper rubber hood for the stock hood.

It seems possible that Canon could engineer a mount method that would not suffer this type of wear. Maybe they could also do something about this phenomenon where the plastic shade gradually goes from an attractive matte finish to an uneven glossy/shiny finish after months or years of handling (form oils in your skin, I presume).

Make your own judgment on what this says about Canon engineering and build quality, but for now I suppose we have to just consider it "normal wear." For my part, I hope there are other design imperatives higher up on the whiteboard than "shade that stays tight and pretty."

Higher end scanning hardware pays off for scanning film originals (slides, negatives), but for prints, you are likely to get very good to excellent results with about any consumer level flatbed scanner. About any scanner can scan at a minimum of 600dpi. JonAustin in his post chose to italicize "effective resolution," and that is a key term to remember in scanning photographic print originals. Once you scan a print at higher than, say, 400 dpi, 600 at the most, all you are getting is a more and more finely detailed representation of the paper surface texture, the grain of the image, and any dirt and dust clinging to the print. Higher resolutions do NOT pull any additional detail out of the actual image. Extremely close examination of a print will usually reveal it is not as sharp as you think it is from normal arms-length viewing, so super-high resolution scans usually don't do you any favors.

I've invested in some fairly decent quality scanning equipment (Microtek i800 scanners) which are good for film scanning, but for prints, these scanners aren't that noticeably better than the old late-90's-vintage Epson all-in-one I had before.

Thanks, I'm taking notes of this for when I'm going to do some scanning -these kinds of threads are motivating (but I prefer to leave that type of work for the dark days of fall/winter).

Good plan. I packed away my film archive by the end of April probably would excavate it again until holiday time.

One thing important to know about VueScan that I forgot to mention: The RAW files it puts out are compatible with Lightroom/ACR, but NOT Aperture. That's one thing that started my move away from Aperture even before Apple announced it was reaching end-of-life.

Used an epson v750 for hundreds of slides, thousands of negatives in different sizes from 70+ years of photography. The details you can get from old b&w negatives is amazing. It took a while and some experimentation to dial it in. Key benefit of this scanner is two pass scanning, one in IR to eliminate dust, scratches, etc. Highly recommend VueScan for the process, it also has profiles for many different types of negatives. Not sure if you can apply that to images you take with your camera but you might check that out.

Your post saved me some keystrokes. +1 on everything. I don't have hands on with V750, but have hired out some work to a provider who uses a V700 (essentially the same machine without wet-mount ability), and was very pleased with the quality. And Vuescan is killer. Every hardware provider should just stop trying to develop their own half-arsed proprietary software and just make a bundling deal with Ed Hamrick for Vuescan, which allows you to essentially save out RAW files of the scanned data so there's not loss due to processing the file out as TIF or JPG. Vuescan is better than software that came with $20,000 Heidelberg scanners I worked with in a previous job.

Epson's V600 is a great flatbed scanner for your old prints, but for film, it's hobbled by so-so software and horrible film holders. I'm using a pair of Microtek i800's that beat the V600 in about every way and plays very well with Viewscan. Got them both for under $200 ea. on eBay. A dedicated film scanner would be the best thing if you have the bucks. For me, scanning is less mission-critical than nostalgic or for archive, so a large expense can't be justified.

I really feel a scanner is by far the best way to go for this type of work, yet my hat is off to the ingenuity shown by those who have built the home brew rigs shown in this thread. If you go the slide duplicator style route, choosing the right kind of lens would be important. A macro lens or even an enlarging lens would have the flattest possible field of focus that would be key to best results. And the odd and varied base colors of the many types of color negative films will give you fits pretty much without a doubt. A scanner (or more correctly, the software) would compensate for that more easily, in addition to the infrared dust cleanup that scanners with that capability can do.

Tolusina has the right idea. Just shoot RAW+JPG or color RAW or JPG and convert in post for maximum control. The in-camera black and white can be surprisingly good, but if you want to really take control of how the tones render, you want to start from the full-color original.

By blending the RGB channels, you can simulate the effects of any color filter. I believe Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and ACR all have facility to mix the color channels to a wide variety of grayscale results so you can bring out your inner Ansel on landscapes or give your portraits the drama of Yousef Karsh or Helmut Newton.

Assuming you want the drama of B&W while still maintaining some natural realism, resist the temptation to make your blacks too black or whites too white. I try to keep,the whites at or below 4% and blacks limited to about 96%. There pretty much is no pure white (outside of speculars) or pure black in the real visible world.

Of course, if your aim is graphic or artistic effect, the rule book is in the shredder.

Are there any electronic contacts on the other side, or is it just a "cold" adapter? The one good thing about my no-name adapter is that it enables focus confirmation (when it works). The lens does focus on infinity, by the way, even though the adapter I have is quite a bit thicker than yours appears to be.

This is different from your use case, but I recently became "bi-cameral" myself. Been switch-hitting for about 8 months.

I own a 1980's vintage Tamron Adaptall 300mm f/2.8 lens. For those unfamiliar, the Adaptall series of lenses were sold "mountless" and were purchased with whatever auxiliary mount was needed for your system (Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Olympus, whatever). I tried a couple of their lenses in the 80's and found them optically quite good, but the deal breaker was that they focused "backwards." At the time, I was a Nikon shooter. Since I am now a Canon shooter, it's no longer backwards to me, and when I saw a mint condition copy of this lens for about 700 bucks, I waffled for a few weeks, but finally bit on it.

Of course, it's a manual focus lens. But I'm old, so I can do that.

To make a long story slightly shorter, the so-so quality of the "fourth-party" lens adapter (Tamron never made one for EOS), plus the need to stop-down meter due to the Tamron's lack of electronic aperture, made the user experience a bit dicey. So finally, I broke down and bought a Nikon D7000 and Tamron Nikon AI Adaptall mount. Since even a relatively new Nikon "understood" the old non-electronic AI mount, stop-down metering is avoided, and there were none of the little electronic glitches I got with the no-name Canon adapter.

So, I effectively have a 450mm 2.8 and one body that never separate from each other. The unit has become quite a workhorse for me for basketball (a little tight, but got some good stuff), indoor track, golf and softball/baseball. Looking forward to soccer this fall.

Since I had a Nikon in my hands for the first time in over 20 years, I made myself take a good look at switching systems. Manual focus direction is a pretty big deal breaker, but even if I surmounted that somehow, I would second the motion that the menu system previously mentioned is torture to use. Since this d7000 is basically a single-use camera for me, I don't need to dig into the menus much, but when I do, well…I can't say it any better than "Gibbon on crack," so why try?

I won't brag on Canon's menus either, since they look like MS-DOS compared to present-day iOS or Android app menus, but Canon's mostly logical layout and the quick control dial at least make it usable.

A lot of people can reach a point when dipping into the "other" system is the best way to solve a problem. Obviously, RGF is an avid landscape shooter. I'm an avid sports shooter, as well as cheapskate, recycler, and old equipment nostalgist. If your personal passion leads you to consider "crossing the line," don't let brand loyalty stand in the way. I guarantee the brand isn't loyal to you.

I throw this out mainly as target practice for those who seem to gleefully shoot down the idea at every opportunity, but could the larger viewfinder housing be for the larger prism necessary for an APS-H sensor? Of course, this would make the camera a "Successor to the 7D market space" rather than, strictly speaking, a "7D Mark II."

I don't think that any successor or replacement for the 7D will be incompatible with EF-S lenses. That would just drive a lot of near-certain buyers down to the 70D.

That argument gets made a lot, but I don't understand it. This camera will be at most 2nd down from top of the line. I don't see the design being constrained by compatibility with the very lowest tier of Canon lenses.

As it stands now, there is not nearly enough distinction between the 7D and 70D. This new camera will certainly correct that with new features and design improvements, including *possibly* a larger sensor. I'd be surprised if these improvements did not push the price north of $2000.00 (I believe the 7D was 1700 at introduction about four years ago.) By my count, only 3 EF-S lenses top $600.00 in price. That's two completely different markets.

We’re told the top plate has a noticeably bigger bump around the viewfinder than the current EOS 7D.

A hybrid viewfinder perhaps? Or maybe the return of eye controlled autofocus?

I throw this out mainly as target practice for those who seem to gleefully shoot down the idea at every opportunity, but could the larger viewfinder housing be for the larger prism necessary for an APS-H sensor? Of course, this would make the camera a "Successor to the 7D market space" rather than, strictly speaking, a "7D Mark II."

The 1D IV stays stubbornly expensive on the used market, which suggests there are a lot of people like me who appreciate the balance of increased reach from telephotos against a near full-frame view angle and depth of field. I've considered buying a 1D IV on a few occasions, but have always shied away from paying more for fewer megapixels and no wi-fi built-in.

I use a "disposable Tupperware" snap lid container for precisely this purpose. It's about a 1 pint rectangular container. Cheap, but pretty sturdy and easily replaceable, though mine is still going strong after more than two years. "GladWare" used to be a prominent brand in this type of product (from the makers of Glad storage/garbage bags), but I'm not sure that is still made as I don't remember seeing it in local stores for some time. Lately I've seen products from Ziploc and also the store brand.

You might consider a Parmesan cheese shaker container as well. That would roughly match the diameter of the HomeDepot item initially referenced, though it's taller. I have a couple of those living second lives around the house, though not for anything photo related so far.

I'm just glad no gear heads around here have punked on you for using a 6D for sports. Obviously a 1D-IV or X or a 5DIII are better suited for sports, but any camera is a "sports camera" if the photographer develops a good enough sense of timing. I'd suggest practicing every chance you get at capturing peak action with a single frame. Manual focusing skills can be huge, too.

A piece of advice I'd give is key on faces rather than the ball (or frisbee or whatever). Awareness of the location of the "object of interest" is important, but also work on learning to spot when the tell-tale grimace is forming on the face of a soccer player who is about to head the ball or a batter who's about to get drilled by a pitch. That will lead you to peak action much better than following the ball through the air.

But you're asking about portfolio. Advice given here so far is pretty good. All I'd add is try to look at the potential client's website or other publications and show that you can deliver what they have used before or (best possible case) show that you can do better. Also don't short yourself by not being ready to talk money. I like to offer somewhat lower charges per event if they will contract for a larger number of events. Back up your skills with a good value proposition.

Just to pull some numbers out of the air, I'd rather shoot 10 events for $2000 than 5 events for $1500. More work pays more bills. And the more of your stuff they have the more of it they will publish, which will (or should) mean more appearances of your byline and more exposure for you. And even though I've been at this for over 30 years, nothing keeps you sharp or makes you better like shooting a *LOT*.

I was once gainfully employed in a dying industry -- book publishing. After several months of escalating mutual hatred between myself and my employer, they gave up trying to build a paper trail on me and offered me 6 months salary if I would just LEAVE. Having a recent track record of several years making between 10-15 grand a year on a dozen odd weekends without even really trying that hard, I took their kind offer went freelance in 2006. This, by my reckoning, was precisely one year before I and every other pro in the market was devoured by the beast that goes by many names: "Timmy's Mom." "Lisa's Dad." "Billy's uncle."

Yes, the youth sports photo market deserted me right when I needed it most. Photography is unique in this way as far as I know. Every week, people go out and buy a Rebel kit on Saturday, *maybe* read part of the manual while on the crapper on Sunday, and then start handing out business cards on Monday. Since these people have "day jobs" they have no concept of what the price of the services they plan to offer are worth ("Is $50.00 for a wedding too much?") and drive their local market down by working for hobby prices. Nobody invests in a set of tools and then starts doing auto repair or carpentry or plumbing for cheap or free. But this happens in photograph ALL THE TIME.

As much as this is a kick in the gut to people like me who have honed their craft for over three decades, I can't whine about it. I could hope for amateurs to respect the craft, learn something about the business they are pushing in on, and at least charge a fair price. And, while yer at it, let's have peace in the middle east and the *WORLD SERIES CHAMPION CHICAGO CUBS.*

If you still get the job asking a fair price, then congratulations, you've beaten me in the marketplace fair and square. But it you are giving your work away or charging hobby rates, you are hurting somebody, whether or not you even know who he or she may be.

The reality as I have found it to be in recent years is that photography skills are secondary (distantly) to marketing skills. Which is precisely why I get my butt kicked every year. I suck at marketing and always will. I don't have the personality for it. The thought of "developing my brand" makes me nauseous.

But I love the work and can't walk away. I make far too much money at photography to just leave on the table, but not enough to live on. So, I do my one-off jobs and service my contracts for part of my income, and clean toilets and mow grass for the rest and for insurance. That's my choice and I am not crying over it. Damn sure nobody else is.